John Searle is well known for his contributions to the philosophy of language and to the philosophy of mind. In recent years he has extended his investigation to focus on the nature of social reality. In particular, he is intrigued by the creation of institutional facts, such as money, marriages and football matches. He postulates three primitive notions - 'collective intentionality', 'the assignment of function' and 'constitutive rules' - that are needed for the construction of institutional reality. The papers and (...) comments making up this symposium are, on the one hand, dealing with Searle's notion of the Background, and on the other hand they are concerned with the ways in which Searle's criticism of various computational theories of the mind may be seen to complement, and to bolster, Hayek's strictures on central economic planning. (shrink)

Our response to Davidson is two?pronged. First, we dispute the basis for his dismissal of Austrian economics as presented by O'Driscoll and Rizzo. In particular, we reject his claim, dictated entirely by his Post Keynesian perspective, concerning an ?identical axiomatic foundation? of Austrian and neoclassical economics. Second, we seek to show that Davidson's criticism of neoclassicism (and by implication of Austrianism) is based on a superficial, incorrect, and outmoded reading of neoclassical economics.